SHROUD OF DARKNESS - Turin Shroud is not a Miracle

The Turin Shroud is the most famous relic in the world. Millions believe that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ bearing his crucified and bloodied image. The cloth is kept at Turin in Italy. The cloth is an enigma. Many say it is a miracle.
 
There are sound reasons for believing that the Shroud is a clever forgery.

It is bizarre how the face of "Jesus" matches the way medieval people visualised him. He had long hair and a long face and a beard. Nobody knows what Jesus looked like but we do know he was not really likely to resemble paintings by gothic medieval artists.
 
The Shroud man was bleeding too much to have been dead which indicates some kind of a hoax. Whoever forged the Shroud wanted to discredit the resurrection.

Just putting a man into a sheet and not binding him up inside it is an odd way of burying anybody. We know that nobody was bound up inside it for there is no evidence of creases. The creases would cause the image to be full of blank bits and a good bit distorted. Even if the burial was done in a hurry and meant to have been completed later on Jesus would have been bound up. It only took a minute. There should be fragmented images on the back of the image for wrinkles in the cloth are inevitable when a corpse is laid down and covered loosely in a cloth.

The shadows on the Shroud are not right. The print of the start of the neck at the collar bone shows puts the black bit between this area and the beard outside the boundaries of reason unless it is a forgery. The cloth when it was touching the neck should show the print of the rest of the neck. It is as if there is no neck. The division between the buttocks is too wide. The split would be very narrow if this man was laid on a surface which would have pushed the buttocks together reducing it. We would expect a pile of blood to be there having made its course from the back along the furrow where the spine is and run down after mixing with a lot of sweat. But there is none. This proves that the blood did not come from the body. Some would think that somebody left an image of themselves on the cloth and somebody decided to turn it into a relic of Jesus.

The hair and the beard hang down as if the man was standing up in the shroud. The hair would not be doing that if the man was lying down and the beard would have been pushed against the chin and the throat. The idea from The Second Messiah that the man lay in the Shroud in a very soft mattress (page 205) so that it made the hair frame the face is partly wrong. It would have caused great distortion in the picture of the back of the head. Why is the hair so tidy in the front? It just hangs down and the man was supposed to be lying down and it is so tidy as if the man was tidied up for the display! And the man would only have been in a mattress if he were meant to survive. The idea of him lying in sand is wrong for it is not soft enough. If the man was laid out in a mattress or on sand when dead men like Jesus were put on stone shelves in tombs it is grounds for suspicion that the man was not Jesus.

The Shroud man’s hair at the back was laid out perfectly and it tapered into a point at the bottom. Why would the people who buried Jesus have been so careful with his hair? This indicates that the image was intended for display and was not the real Shroud. If the head were cut off as many things indicate, it would have been more likely for the hair to be laid out properly before the body was laid in the Shroud.
 
The hair would not be hanging down if the man was lying down and the beard would have been pushed against the chin and throat. The Christians object that the hair and beard were stiff with dried blood so they stayed in the position they were in when he was upright on the cross. But the hair is still too straight for Jesus would have hung his head down at times and rested it on the left shoulder and on the right shoulder which would change the way the hair would set. And the hair on the Shroud man just has specks of blood on it and is not matted with blood. Close up the hairs look mostly clean. They look like they don’t have a crusted cover of blood over them. The lies the Christians tell to support the Shroud are truly tiresome. The hair proves the man on the cloth was not Jesus Christ.
 
The excuse for the hair hanging down is conclusively disproved by the fact that the hair was laid out and tapered at the back and tidied up. This manipulating of the hair showed that it would have been made manageable. Those who buried the man were anxious to have his hair right. They were not the burial party of the gospels who buried Jesus nearby for they were in a hurry as the day of rest was imminent. The Shroud man was buried by people who had plenty of time.
 
The blood would have been washed out of the hair by the heavy rain gushing out of the heavens when Jesus was on the cross. The gospels say there was climatic upheaval at that time such as earthquakes and darkness so we can safely infer that if we asked the gospellers if there was rain they would say there was. The blood blots around the head are not watery from the rain at all which adds weight to the cloth being a forgery. The hair would have been tossed by the wind. It is just too tidy.
 
The Second Messiah holds that the man lay in the Shroud on the mattress and the mattress rose higher than his nose all around his body so that the Shroud lay flat on top of him and the forces that put the image on it shot up straight from the body in a vertical fashion meaning that an image with only slight distortion appeared. I would add that if this happened the man was not in the Shroud. When the front image was projected they turned him on his belly in the mattress and put the cloth over him as before to get the back image except they turned the unmarked part of the cloth to get the back image on it. Just like some people give off strange electric shocks this could have been a man with a mutant chemistry that was known to make images so he was used for the purpose of forging the Shroud. Some say the blood could have been put on simply by carefully pressing the cloth over the body in such a way that it would look anatomically correct. They then took care to make sure the image of the body would match the position of the blood. But that was too difficult. Even if it did happen it still shows the Shroud was meant for deliberate display. It was a forgery.

The Shroud was intended for display when the face is clearer than the rest of it and so it is clearer than it should be and the hands cross the genitals where they would not stay if the man were really a corpse.

The Catholic scholar, Dr Raymond Brown, wrote that since the buttocks are faint and the navel and genitals are hidden it appears that the Shroud is a forgery (page 150, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine). The artist would not like to represent Jesus as a sexual being. The face is clearest because that is what people would most want to see. “Wild notes that the body image in the Shroud is portrayed as relaxed in death, but in a relaxed position a man’s joined hands will not cover his genitals if he lies on his back. Either the body has to be tilted forward and the arms stretched downward, or the elbows have to be propped up on the side and the wrists drawn together to hold the hands in place over the genital area. In the Shroud image also, the right arm is exceedingly long and the fingers of the right hand almost disproportionate, in order to allow the modest covering” (page 152). This too makes Brown suspicious. To be, the man must have been alive to hold his hands like that.

The buttocks should have been extremely plain on the cloth.  The dead weight of the man should have been on it.  Do some people not know gravity exists?  There was light pressure over the man.  Yet there is no significant difference between front and back.  Do you want to start saying the man was laid on the ground and one half of the cloth draped over him lightly?  And then turned over?  It is an error how the cloth is too uniform.  It may be the worst error of them all.

Wilson says there is something that may be the tip of a penis but he is not sure. It could be a swelling on the hand. But if it is a penis it does not affect the problems with the Shroud’s modesty for it is barely noticeable and even if noticed it is still not known what it is.

When a man was nailed through the wrists the thumbs would contract into the palms of the hand. The man on the Shroud is said to show no thumbs. But there are vague spots that may be the thumbs. If the thumbs were in the palms the left hand which is crossed over the right should be up very high leaving a big blank gap where the cloth didn’t touch anything. There is no such blank bit meaning that the thumbs were not in the palms meaning that the man was not crucified or that the image is a forgery. Perhaps the man tucked the thumb of the top hand into the lower one which held it to make it easier to keep the hands together? This would explain the gap but then the top hand covers the wrist of the lower hand and the fingers of the latter are seen entirely which you will see does not happen if you hold your thumb the way the Shroud man might have done.

There is a thin line where we would expect to see the thumb of the top hand – a trace of the thumb?

The Turin Shroud can’t be authentic even if it dates from the first century and even if it can’t be explained.
 
The errors on the Shroud prove that if there is a mystery about how it was created, it is still not authentic.
 
The Turin Shroud is not the winding sheet of Jesus Christ and is a warning to the world that what cannot be explained is not necessarily a miracle. The Shroud is a relic of evil for it is used by many to scare people into accepting a faith that is bad for them. For example, we know how the faith of the pope commands that we force people to spread AIDS by depriving them of condoms and that we terrify children by telling them that Hell exists. The Shroud also tells us that God can let terrible things be done to a man without sin, if he needed to suffer then how much do we need to suffer. The Shroud is evil and was once under the control of occultists in the Knights Templar so believers in black magic can speculate if that had something to do with its production.